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Deregulation and Niagara Mohawk - Is There a Story?
It's just a few hours after the Northeast U.S. power outage, and facts are trickling in; as of right now, it looks like an accidental overload knocked out a large part of the Niagara Mohawk power grid. A few years ago, California went through rolling blackouts that were largely due to a poorly-executed deregulation of that state's power industry. The question that's probably occurring to many of us is, did late-'90s deregulation play a role in today's power event? I don't know the answer, so I'm turning it over to you -- moderators, please check links and up-mod the most informative, pro or con. Here is some information to get you started:
"We support deregulation 100 percent..." (N-M spokesman, 1997; notes N-M wanted to sell generators and "concentrate on the transmission and distribution of energy" -- did it?);
N-M made some bad investments and is
scheduled to request a rate hike (did it?);
and N-M's own website says:
"Deregulation [has] changed the laws and regulations governing the electricity industry to promote competition..." (how so?).
This certainly sounds like the 1996 Great Northest Blackout.
http://blackout.gmu.edu/events/tl1965.html
Robert
--- If it's worth doing, it's worth doing in Perl!
"California went through rolling blackouts that were largely due to a poorly-executed deregulation of that state's power industry"
l /main546097.shtml
Actually, there was a significant amount of fraud involved. Check it out here: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/03/26/nationa
In case people are wondering how the power grid works, here is an article on howstuffworks.com on how
The power grid works
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Maybe regulation/deregulation is not as much the issue as redundancy in the power grid. I would think that it would make sense for there to be enough reduancy and backup systems in a power grid as large as the one described so that black outs such as this one do not occour.
On the other hand, the need for redundancy, or possibly for areas to draw power from other sources is expensive, and does not fit the model of a profitable buisness. Regulation could help by fueling money into redundancy and requireing a certian ammount of backup systems in place so that major black outs occour. Also, as far as I understand, the power grids is large cities have not grown to keep up with demand in said cities making blackouts or atleast brown outs more plausable.
Then again, this is only news because black outs of the magnitude happen so rarely. In all likelyhood this was a freak accident on the level that will not happen again for another 30 years or so. Hopefuly the people in charge of both the power grid in most areas as well as most major metropolitan areas have backup plans for when events such as this one occour. One can only hope.
I just saw the first political spin on this mess. Bill Richardson, the Former Energy Secretary, was on CNN saying we have a "third world power grid". What he didn't say and the CNN sycophant wouldn't bring up is that while he was in office the Clinton administration turned down every request to build new or upgrade existing power stations. The theory of the grid is that when one part of the grid needs power it can be shunted from areas with excess capacity. Just as in California (who also refused to build new capacity) THERE IS NO EXCESS CAPACITY! When one part is at capacity, they all are.
Quite frankly, we're a living in a tech world now. We need the power. Until we stop politically cowtowing to "eco-nuts", "consumer advocates". and other neo-luddites this is going to keep happening.
It doesn't matter what you wrap your emotions around, Reality is a brick wall specifically designed to scramble eggs
Last theory from Canadian governement is a thunderstorm near the border of canada-us, US-side, that cause the blackout.
Wrong. It has everything to do with deregulation.
If a power company builds a new power line at their expense, they must allow other companies access and sell power using that line.
Companies aren't building power infrastructure beyond the minimum required because they get screwed. You will see more of this happening.
PS Full Disclosure. I am biased as I have worked in the power supply business for several decades.
-- I wasn't there. I didn't do it. I don't know how. I don't know anyone who does.
the results have generally been regarded as disasterous - most notably a rise in power bills for both domestic and industrial consumers that topped out at well over double. the power rate increase resulted in less disposable consumer income and increased cost of doing business in the province and was regarded as an election-killer by the current administration.
so they spent their way out of it to the the tune of $2.3 billion. that was direct subsidies to rate payers. of course the whole subsidy was a charade since those same rate payers were going to pay for their "subsidies" in income tax increases or reduced social spending in other areas. clearly a case of cutting you a cheque with your own money.
so who got rich? the power companies. same service, same power, more money.
bottom line: electricity is a necessity. like water, or the police service. it is a completely inelastic commodity and privatizing it is only encouraging the new power overlord (since there is, really, only one major power provider... a monopoly) to charge the maximum the market will bear and damn the consequences.
source here: here
2 1337 4 u!
Regarding the rolling blackouts in California, they had more to do with Enron witholding power than with deregulation.
Not just Enron:
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
California put some rather peculiar rules in place regarding how much should be paid to move power at certain times. What ended up happening is that companies were able to take advantage of these fees by moving power around unnecessarily and at peak times, forcing the state and other consumers of the power to pay more. It was the rough power equivalent of having your cab driver take you from O'hare to the Loop via Milwaukee.
So yes, in this case, eliminate the rules that dictated that the price of power was based on the competition for transmission lines at a particular time (something the people controlling the transmission lines could easily inflate by moving power around unnecessarily) and the companies would not have been able to misbehave. The regulations gave the power companies the ability to set the prices for what they were selling.
paintball
A former DTE employee, I am typing this on my laptop with no power here in Detroit, MI. I agree, this is certainly not a result of deregulation. Perhaps I can offer some insight on some of the specifics.
The reason so many plants are now offline is because of a safety system put in place to protect their generating equipment. An overload can severely damage generators. The device which disconnects the plant from the grid is a shoebox-sized relay. The great northeastern blackout of 1965 was actually caused by a defective relay.
However, it is highly unlikely that a relay was the cause of this outage. If not for faulty equipment, what caused it to happen? Since the problem seems to have originated in Niagra Falls, New York, I suspect that a major line which provedes part of the northeastern US with power from generating plants in Canada went down. This event would have triggered the above scenario, causing plants in both the US and Canada to shut down.
It is interesting to note that, as with land-based phone systems, little has changed in the way power is distributed to customers in the last 30 years (certainly advances in fiber optics have advanced phone systems, but the last-mile copper systems have remained unchanged in over 50 years). Hopefully now, systems will be put in place to prevent outages of this magnitude from happening again. A system of automated switches with real-time network links could be used to disconnect parts of the grid instantly before the problem could spread. Maybe we will see some of this technology in the future, now that there is a definate need to persue it.
Look, people. There isn't anything or anyone to blame for this.
The Niagra Mohawk power grid serves the area in question. The way a power grid works is that there is a mesh of generation stations that are all interconnected by high-voltage transmission lines, 480kV on up. Each generation station has a primary service area and one or more (usually more) entry/exit stations where energy can either enter or exit the primary service area, depending on what they're telling the control system to do.
A network of generation stations makes up a grid, and at the boundary of a grid, there are similar entry/exit stations.
All generators, whether they be nuclear, hydro, wind, or whatever, have TONS of safety interlocks that engage at various points during abnormal conditions to prevent catastrophic failure. One of these interlock behaviors is to shut down and remove the generator from the grid in the event of an overload.
The likely sequence of events in this situation is that there was a failure at one of the generators in the N-M grid that resulted in the shutdown of that generator. What happens when a generator shuts down is that all of the entry/exit points flip to "entry" mode to allow neighboring generators to take up the slack. Most generator companies have agreements with their neighbors to buy however much electricity they need at whatever the current price is, without acknowledgement, when one of these shutdown events happens.
Anyway, once the initial generator shut down and the entry/exit stations flipped to entry mode, the neighboring generators were unable to take up the slack, so they in turn shut down as well. Then, a domino effect set in until it reached the boundary of the N-M grid, or when someone at the operator station woke up and hit the red button that prevents the transfer stations from automatically flipping to "entry" mode.
Keep in mind that it didn't necessarily have to be an overload that caused it - a generator can shut down for a number of reasons.
This all could have been a control system failure, an operator error, or some other unfortunate combination of events that happened to lead to a catastrophic grid failure.
One of the costs in getting power is that power's distribution - transmission lines cost money, and moving power over transmission lines thus costs money. California, as part of their "deregulation", put in place a system where the price of wholesale power was affected by not only the amount of power, but how the power got from point A to point B. The real pitfall with the rule was that it ALSO took into account supposed congestion on transmission lines - prices were set higher for wholesale power delivered when there was apparently a lot of people wanting to transmit power over given lines.
The obvious pitfall being that power line congestion could be artificially created - Enron (and others) took to moving power around more than necessary, creating more congestion, and thus artificially inflating the prices local power providers had to pay to get power over transmission lines.
Even worse, not only did the "deregulation" regulations allow Enron et. al. to artificially inflate the price of wholesale power, they ALSO prevented local power providers (the guys who actually delivered the power to your house) from raising the prices to make up for it, forcing them to sell power at a loss.
This could only go on so long before the local power companies started to run out of money, at which point they just said "Screw it", and instead of delivering power at a loss that they couldn't pay for anyway, they just stopped delivering power at all.
paintball
I worked in the power control/data aquisition field for a while and can assure you that in a complex grid it is very difficult to pin-point failures.
Consider that there are normally many redundant lines and generation points. If a generation point goes offline, then the load through the lines changes. If a line's capcacity is exceeded it trips. This increses the load through other lines and you can get run-away instability. All this shit goes down in a second or so, so figuring out where things went wrong is not easy. Figuring the *trigger* might be easy (eg. generation point failed), but at what point does the redundancy fail (ie does the system itself fails)?
To keep on top of this, most grids run constant 'what if' analysis of their network. ie. if line x or generator y trips what will happen? if load increases at point x what will happen? The analysis helps to ensure that sufficient redundancy is switched in to cover certain failures to a certain risk level.
Unfortuantely with cost cutting etc, building of new lines and upgrading often gets delayed. Thus, the opportunities for redundancy are decreased and the risk levels are increased.
BTW: It is also a hell of a task to restart a grid.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I moved to Alberta from BC, to the left of Alberta on a map for those that don't know Canada, where the power is generally supplied by two companies, BC Hydro or West Koutenay Hydro (recently changed their name to something I can't remember). BC has abundant supplies of energy in the form of hydro electric power and depending on where you live you are supplied by one of these two companies.
My electrical cost in BC was more than half the KWh rate it is in Alberta, somewhere around 4.5 cents/KWh. On top of the KWh rate, I pay a consent fee and a storage rider and a whole host of bullshit fees that I did not see in BC because of REGULATION. I paid usage in KWh and that was it. I could even look on the meter and calculate my KWh usage and get a rough idea of what my bill was going to be (if you remember this from High School). You sure as hell can't do that here, who knows what the "storage rider" will be this month.
I have never understood the deregulation mentality; electricity is a necessity and business, especially high technology sectors, require and are attracted to cheap, reliable power. Deregulation has done none of that here in Alberta, costs are up and generation is down to maximize profit. I know several companies that locate themselves in BC due to the high demand they place on electricity, power that cannot be supplied by other provinces at such an attractive rate.
Now they are talking about partial deregulation of the BC market. Once again businesses small and large will get the shaft and the electrical producing companies will reap the rewards. Talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul.
After doing some research on this for an undergrad paper, it turns out that it was a combination of bad luck and accounting/management.
:)
The major 110kV CBD feeder lines had their lifetimes "reassessed" and it was decided that there were still plenty of years left in them. So they took their time replacing them (it was underway when the crisis started), but it turns out their lifetimes were more like the original specifications (funny that).
One major 110kV line failed while one was down for maintenance, which lead to the failure of another two 110kV lines a few days later due to overloading. It didn't help when some monkey roadworker dug thru one of the smaller 40kV feeders that were helping prop up the cbd either.
Then it got fun - rolling morning/afternoon blackouts, companies moving to offices out in the suburbs, temporary overhead lines erected running 20km to one of the other distribution yards, generators everywhere...
Deregulation hadn't been completed at that stage - the new lines/distribution company in Auckland which came in to being a year or so after the crisis is taking their job very seriously and has done a lot to improve uptime and redundancy.
Rob
This is not the first massive northeastern blackout. There were wipespread blackouts like this in the early 1960s. The engineers learned that all sections of the grid must have significant over-capacity designed in so that the entire system could recover from large transients and short duration system oscillation without tripping protection devices. They beefed up the system so it could ride through these events.
The safety margin is gone. Demand has grown but capacity has not. If lightning runs in on a substation, it can trigger a chain of events leading to a couple generator switchyards opening their air breakers. From there, the overload snowballs.
Does deregulation play a part? Yes. Power brokering activities create additional burden on the system. There is less incentive to increase capacity. There is also diffusion of responsibility.
The electric power industry was not broken prior to deregulation and didn't need fixing. It's infrastructure and regulated monopolies suck less than gov't run or private run ventures.
This is apt to get worse.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
What causes cascades like this actually has very little to do with megawatts
and everything to do with frequency. See, every generator on the power grid is
syncronized to a common source. Indeed, before a power plant comes back on
line it must first syncronize its generators. The generators normally sit
there running at a boring 3600 RPM (60hz*60 seconds). All plants have a
monitor that kicks them off line if their frequency varies by more than +/- a
hz or so. As an aside, the power grid is not always EXACTLY 60 hz. The
frequency of the entire grid is allowed to float a bit, though drifts are
corrected so the frequency averaged over a certain time is a nominal 60 Hz.
The cascade happens when a either big plant or a big load suddenly goes off
line. In the case of a big plant the other plants try to take up the load, but
in the process their frequency drops as the generators get loaded more (much
like shifting a car's manual transmission to a higher gear before it hits the
right engine RPM). Once a generator drops below 59 hz, it also trips off
making it even harder for the ones left to keep up, and generators begin to
fall off the grid like dominoes.
The opposite happens when a load suddenly goes away, but in that case the
generators' frequency abruptly jumps upward, which also results in it tripping
off the grid. Either way the result is a cascade like happened today.
Once the dominoes (generators) begin to fall off, the grid becomes unglued.
There's an old saying in the power industry:
59.5 Hz = trouble. 59 Hz = BIG trouble!
I believe the new power management software mentioned in the news reports that
should have prevented this works by intelligently shedding loads distant from where the anomaly occurrs (for example, shedding load in NYC for an anomaly in Canada). This would give the generators time to react to the change. Obviously it didn't work.
Thanks for the backup on this one.
While I don't necessarily agree that regulation is the answer, it's a simple matter of ethics.
De-regulation wasn't really de-regulation. It was RE-regulation. The rules simply changed, and there became many more of them, one of which was that no new generating plants could be built. Why the hell they decided this was beyond me. Most of these generators were built "way back when" before the age of computers and ubiquitous use of air conditioning. PECO Energy became the most expensive electricity in the nation after PA "de-regulated" the electricity industry. I pay almost $0.16 per kWh, which is ridiculous by any standard. That money is used to pay for electricity that is practically given away to neighboring producers like PP&L and ConEd.
Anyway...
You'd be AMAZED at what percentage of all generated power is dissipated in either a computer or an air conditioner/chiller/etc. 100 million computers at 200 watts each is 20 BILLION watts. 20 GIGAwatts. That's the capacity of more than 20 average-sized nuclear reactors. Limerick here in PA has two reactors each capable of about 1.134 (I was really hoping it was 1.21, really I was!) gigawatts.
Here's a Link to a list of all U.S. Nuclear facilities and their statistics and capacities.
And here is a link to a list of all the reactor statuses showing they're loaded to the teeth - almost all of them at 100%.
The U.S. Department of Energy maintains lots of useful information about the power grids in the United States and how they are running. There are also publicly available status reports on each generation facility.
One graph on the DoE site showed that generation capacity hasn't increased at all since about 1992 (when Clinton took office, what a surprise... bastard killed the military AND our power infrastructure... but that's another thread)...
It's not surprising that this happened since we've been increasing generation rapidly due to the deployment of computers and other tech gadgets, but not increasing capacity to make up for it. It also doesn't help that there's no incentive other than cost for people to use Alternative Energy like solar or wind. Well, that's not totally true, there are actually Lots and Lots of Incentives in some states for end-user renewable energy, but it's still really expensive.
Actually they do know.
Federal Power Commission investigators found a single faulty relay at the Sir Adam Beck Station no. 2 in Ontario, Canada, which caused a key transmission line to disconnect ("open").
This small failure triggered a sequence of escalating line overloads that quickly raced down the main trunk lines of the grid, separating major generation sources from load centers and weakening the entire system with each subsequent separation.
As town after town went dark throughout the northeast, power plants in the New York City area automatically shut themselves off to prevent the surging grid from overloading their turbines.
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
But what about resistance? The original power distribution framework set up in this country (USA) was DC...but AC quickly overtook it because AC is not nearly as susceptible to line loss. It just makes more sense to use AC...unless you've got some room-temp superconducting power lines.
California did not refuse to construct new plants; this is a Limbaughesque lie. In fact, the predictions were that deregulation would lower the cost of power so much that nobody _wanted_ to invest in building a plant; there simply weren't any applications made during the period which deregulation was being discussed because nobody thought they would be anything but a big waste of money.
Greg Palast takes a look at why the lights went out.